Design Classics: TAG Heuer Monaco

The Steve McQueen Watch

By Kim Messenger/Life@Home

Watches are back, have you noticed? Some of these new watches are real beasts. You can see them halfway across the mall, glittering at you.

Some watches are nicer than others. The Victorinox “Swiss Army” brand for men and women have clean lines, a minimum of glitter, and a kind of punk quality. But if we are going to talk about classics, only one really makes it in my book, and that is the Monaco watch, worn by Steve McQueen in the 1971 movie, Le Mans.

Many of you may be too young to quite appreciate how cool Steve McQueen was. Born in Indiana, his mother was a prostitute and his father was a stunt pilot who left before Steve was born. Seriously. He grew up in the Depression on a hardscrabble farm in Missouri. Got into trouble. Ended up in the Junior Boys Republic in Chino, Calif. Ran away and lived with his mother in Greenwich Village where he worked in a brothel as a towel boy. Then he joined the Marines. By the time he got out and went to acting school in 1952 he was already a man who contained vast prairie acres of pain and experience in his face, a quick fuse, a distant gaze, and a truly beautiful face.

He made more money racing motorcycles than as an actor in the early days, and motorsports remained his genuine passion — thanks to the red tricycle his grandfather gave him on the farm. He started to break out in Hollywood in some television series but it was the 1963 film The Great Escape that defined his persona. In it, he plays a POW in a German prison camp, too much of a rebel to go along with the rest of the POWs’ escape plan. He spends much of the movie in solitary confinement, bouncing a baseball against a wall. Finally, he escapes with the others and makes his desperate dash to freedom at the Swiss border on a motorcycle. It’s fantastic, and if he had done nothing else he would have left his stamp on American cinema then and there.

Other movies include the Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 (which gave us the song “Windmills of your Mind”), but perhaps the film that was closest to his heart was Le Mans (1971), certainly the greatest auto-racing film ever, which featured actual footage from the 1970 24-hour race Porches and Ferraris, and McQueen as the driver Delaney. It is a film of few words, loud engines, meaningful glances, and the existential prospect of a fiery death.

Well, anyway, it’s cool. McQueen wanted to be as authentic as possible so he borrowed the driving gear of professional driver Jo Siffert. Siffert wore the Heuer chronograph logo on his overalls. McQueen also added the blue-faced, square TAG Heuer chronograph watch with the blue alligator skin straps now called the Monaco. The watch was the first to have an automatic chronograph — basically a stopwatch with smaller dials to record tenths of a second, the kind of thing that might be useful for timing your car’s journey around a lap, for instance.

I think it is the blue with the orange highlights and the square face that makes this watch cool. The colors may have been inspired by the Gulf Oil logo, also a sponsor of Siffert. The watch design just says: “This is a tool for a man who is precise, not a piece of jewelry, but I like beautiful things as well. I can be in control. I can also, in my heart, be a bird.” How like Steve McQueen himself.

No man would turn this baby down. A new one will cost about $3,900 at various locations, or $5,900 at www.tourneau.com. But the poster of McQueen standing in front of his car sporting the watch is only $30 at amazon.com and that’s what I’d get my man on Father’s Day to let him know that he’s my Steve McQueen.